


perfect

by fuckener



Category: Glee
Genre: Apocalypse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-24
Updated: 2013-01-24
Packaged: 2017-11-26 19:00:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/653418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckener/pseuds/fuckener
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam plays pretend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	perfect

Sam pretends they’ve been in love all along. There’s enough empty time to fill his head with replays and rewrites of the past so he tries his best to.  
  
They stay in the biggest room of a motel that’s been left deserted because neither of them want to sleep in somebody else’s home, or to find what could be left there beneath broken windows and debris and the glass of a photo frame. ( _Who_. But most of the time Sam feels like there’s nobody else left, anyway.)  
  
At night, Sam sits up in his narrow single bed and looks over at where he thinks Kurt is, where he thinks he can see Kurt’s chest push out, where he thinks he can hear the slightest breaths coming from, and he paces his breathing to match out of a habit he made sleeping in the same bed as his kid siblings for two months. He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment again and he tries his best not to think about them.  
  
Sam holds his knees to his chest and thinks of Kurt, and the years they haven’t spent together and the songs they’ve never sang to each other. (The people that wouldn’t have broke their hearts: all the girls Sam could have been friends with if he hadn’t tried so hard to love them, and the boys that would never have had the chance to torment Kurt if they’d saw one just like them by his side.) He doesn’t know if he falls asleep or if he lies awake all night, thinking of them and what they aren’t.  
  
In the morning, Kurt wakes him up with a hand on his shoulder and a small, stiff smile across his face. His eyes look red and sore and tired and Sam tries his best not to think about him crying. He blinks up at Kurt for a moment and stretches his mouth into a slow grin that aches, and aches and aches.   
  
“Time to go,” Kurt tells him softly, standing up again, and Sam lies in bed for another moment and thinks of the curve of his lips and dimples in his cheeks and all the kisses they haven’t shared.  
  


-

  
  
Sam pretends Kurt loves him, too. It’s not the craziest thing to pretend in the middle of the apocalypse, especially when (he’s reasonably sure) there’s nobody else left in the world but the two of them.  
  
He sees meaning in every look they share, every touch they make, every hint of colour on Kurt’s cheeks. He sees it in _everything_ , and each time, he feels a quick thrill run through him and make his heart beat in time to this new, frantic world they’re in. It’s the best feeling Sam thinks he’s ever known, when Kurt looks at him for a particularly outdrawn second and all of the things they didn’t (don’t) have together seem like they could be real if only they share enough long looks. It’s like coming up from a lifetime underwater to discover the air. Like finding something you’ve been waiting forever to have at the end of the world.   
  
Sometimes it’s terrifying and it makes Sam’s palms sweat and his bangs stick to his forehead. Sometimes it’s hot and it makes his stomach warm, his skin feel sensitive and aching to be touched, or his hand slip a little too low down his own body than is appropriate with Kurt asleep in the bed across from him.  
  
It takes a while for him to realise all he has is an ill-timed crush.  
  


-

  
  
He doesn’t forget about home, or Lima, or his family - or the smell of the tiny kitchen they had back in Kentucky in the mornings when his dad would make his coffee, then his breakfast, and say goodbye to him at the door for another week with a smile and a hand clasping Sam’s shoulder tight. (And Sam wishes he’d held on, he’d told him to stay, that the world hadn’t ended while he was in a different state with a different family - a different world entirely from the one at his dining table, sharing breakfast with his dad.) Sam doesn’t forget, but he tries to.  
  
The first week, he’d thought in negotiations and prayer alone. _If they’re alright I promise to_ and _Please look after them_ (and when Kurt stepped into the ugly wreckage of a gas station, his footing clumsy on the debris and the car’s dull headlights as his only guide, _If you make sure he comes back out I’ll make sure that I_ ).   
  
It was too dark to really see Lima when they checked and the headlights were dying out fast, and even though they both picked up the pieces of broken brick and cut their hands on the shattered glass, they still waited for days outside of Kurt’s house while Sam sat in the car holding the wheel in tight fists, praying for the sun to come back up, and Kurt sat in his front garden, staring into the nothingness where his house was meant to be, both of them too scared to step any closer to it.  
  
When the sun started shining again, Kurt had to turn away with shut eyes and ask Sam to look instead, his voice soft and weak. The only sound left in the world - and Sam couldn’t have that breaking, too. He’d cringed against the sunlight and prayed (nothing but _Please, Please, Please_ ) and saw it, what was left of it, of everything.  
  
He’d reached over and touched Kurt’s hand. He’d shut his eyes, too.  
  


-

  
  
Lima makes him think of stopping at a gas station on the way of taking Kurt to the grocery store. Kurt flicking through magazines and Sam paying for his gas. The wind outside rattling the door and the window and how the lights had turned black and then the sky.   
  
(And then -)   
  
Feeling around for Sam’s dad’s busted car and pushing it back onto its wheels with Kurt crying beside him and his own body, shaking and jerking and cold from sweat. No sun left in the sky. In the dim shine of the headlights everything looked wrecked and broken and gone.  
  


-

  
  
Sam doesn’t know how to get back to Kentucky with an empty gray sky as the only thing lighting the way. They keep going though - Kurt wants nothing less than to see Lima ever again, and he still cries every time they stop at garages to load up empty gas containers and steal a few more, in case; every time they drive by fallen billboards about candy, or beer, or girls.   
  
They don’t talk about it.   
  
Sam can’t manage to even when he tries to. When he sees Kurt crying, they are not driving to dinner at Breadstix anymore, they are not taking a roadtrip to the NYADA audition Kurt never got to make anymore. They’re hopeless again. They haven’t been in love for years upon years, again.Their families don’t exist, again, because nothing really does.  
  
(“Where are we going?” Kurt asks in his mind with wet eyes, clasped hands, and Sam imagines the question a lot, all the possible reactions he’d get to the answer, “We’re finding our new home together, just like we always wanted to.”)  
  


-

  
  
The world goes black, again.   
  
It happens out of nowhere, just like the last time, and the time before that, but Kurt’s prepared his messenger bag with candles and matches and lighters, all bundled up next to things that were at first that he never uses anymore - hairspray cans, notebooks, a dead iPhone, his wallet and a pencil with a fluffy pink topper Rachel made for him from a jumper he made her throw away. Sam picked up a plastic bag a week ago and they keep food in it, and cans of sugary drinks that make Kurt’s nose wrinkle when he holds it and takes a reluctant mouthful. (There are photographs at the bottom of it, and a tiny drawing Stevie stuffed into his wallet once to surprise him when he opened it. After Sam tossed his wallet away, he’d kept them and put them there, instead, out of sight but still nearby. He’d tried not to look at them since, but a part of him constantly saw them, anyway, had them burned and branded into his too tender skin.)  
  
They sit in the car in the middle of the empty road and focus on the candle Kurt’s has in his hands, in the shiny silver holder he was sure to pick up on their emergency shopping. Sam hears noises from the darkness outside (buildings collapsing and families disappearing and he thinks briefly of a blond haired boy and girl despite his best efforts not to) and even though they rip through the air, loud and terrifying and an inch away, even thought the car starts to shake them like a warning, there’s nothing they can do but sit there with each other. Nothing.  
  
Sam puts his hands around Kurt’s and brings the candle up a bit higher, enough to see clearly into his eyes. Kurt stares back at him with nowhere else safe to look. Over his shoulder, Sam imagines he can see a line houses caving in on themselves, one by one, and bites his bottom lip until it starts aching, looking back into Kurt’s face for things he knows aren’t there.  
  
He pretends they’re on a date in a noisy drive-in. They sit in the backseat together and Finn and Rachel are on the car hood, and if he tries hard enough he can conjure up the muffled sound of Rachel’s voice, going on and on in the background, comfortingly. Kurt’s fingers twitch beneath his. It’s their first kiss, in Sam’s mind, although in Sam’s mind it’s one of many first kisses - he can’t decide on just one, not for them. And he likes to pretend most of all that he’s never spent a moment with Kurt where he hasn’t been in love. It seems so wasteful of him, now.  
  
Sam imagines the warm brush of Kurt’s cherry-chapstick lips against his, their mouths pressing together carefully, slowly. The complete lack of urgency to it all. The safety. The howl of the wind outside is the audience around them, wolf-whistling at the screen they wouldn’t be (aren’t) watching.  
  
(They would have been perfect.)  
  
Kurt says, quietly, “Sam,” and he comes back again, just like that. Kurt looks at him for another moment, lips shiny where he’s licked across them and his cheeks red and warm when Sam lifts a hesitant hand up to touch one, lightly.  
  
It takes another moment, with Sam completely paralyzed, before Kurt blows the candle out and leans in close. Sam feels his breath against his lips  - a little frantic and scared, the most reassuring warmth he’s felt in weeks - and a hand curls deep in his hair, into a fist. “Sam,” Kurt says again, and again.  
  
This is it, Sam thinks. He closes his eyes and holds Kurt’s face and the noise of the drive-in audience around them is raucous and chaotic (explosive, horrifying, so much just for him to listen too) and Finn and Rachel are alive, cuddled close together on the hood of the car, and this is it, Sam thinks again, and then he takes a deep breath and kisses the boy he wants to love him more than anything else left in the world.  
  


-

  
  
Still-standing buildings are getting harder for them to find. All they really have left is the car, and Kurt says the sky is going black again. Kurt doesn’t say they can’t dodge whatever happens to the world when goes black for much longer, but Sam hears it.   
  
He says, quietly, “Stop the car,” and Sam does because they’re in no hurry with no places to be. Kurt keeps staring out of the windshield mirror and slips his soft hand into Sam’s and Sam stares over at him and holds it as tightly as he can, until he knows it must hurt but he just can’t stop. He closes his eyes and he and Kurt are at a school dance, their favourite restaurant, an altar - holding hands together.  
  
They stay the whole night in the car together, a torch they found lying across the floor and flickering out. Sam kisses him on his lips again, his palms, along his neck, and Kurt squeezes their hands together tightly the whole night and tells him, urgently, over and over, “We don’t have much longer.”  
  


-

  
  
They find a little house with their torches in a line of crumbled concrete and tiles, almost untouched. They even find a _For Sale_ sign in pieces strewn across a few gardens and find the stump of it starting there, at this one little house that’s still safe. They take the last of the candles from Lima and go inside (to stay, Sam thinks, Sam knows, and he thinks Kurt just might, too). Sam links their hands when they reach the splinters of a ruined fence and for a second he thinks Kurt is smiling.   
  
They look around together. There’s no electricity, but the TV is still a strange comfort to find, and the empty fridge that doesn’t hum like the one in Kentucky. Vacuum cleaners and coffee makers and odd things like that - things that just make everything feel more like home - Sam likes having them around, and when he pretends to use them like they work, grinning broadly at Kurt, he’ll laugh, loudly and brightly. So Sam keeps doing it and Kurt keeps laughing.  
  
The bedroom comes last. They take tentative steps to a king-size and Sam holds his breath without realizing. Kurt says he wants to strip the bed before they’re on it and Sam helps him, keeping quiet because there’s something about floral covered sheets that remind him of the master bedroom of Kurt’s house, its door open wide to reveal all the funny, awkward patterns Carole liked to pick out. (She’d made Sam a scarf once at Christmas, when he stayed with them - beaming, tying it around him, and Kurt had faked a smile when she looked and solemnly shook his head at Sam when she turned away.)  
  
Kurt throws the sheets and the pillow covers out the window when they’re done and Sam doesn’t say anything about it. He makes the bed again. Shifts it into place. Makes it as perfect as they’ll get.  
  
(This is it, Sam thinks.)  
  
He and Kurt look at each other for a moment, and then Sam bites his scarred lips and glances at the bed. Kurt laughs again, but it’s fake and it falters. He takes Sam’s hand again, and his is still so warm and good to hold. He kisses the corner of Sam’s mouth (and it’s almost over. They’re almost over).  
  
Lying beside Kurt on their stripped bedsheets feels almost suffocatingly overwhelming. He thinks of where they would have lived together if they’re loved each other a year ago, and the world was still okay. He’s thought of it often: has the entire apartment layout mapped out in his head like a real place that really exists somewhere.   
  
He shifts closer to Kurt and tells him about it. Everything is small inside but the television and the bed, and it barely holds two people, he says. New York. He thinks he could have been happy in New York.  
  
Kurt interrupts him when he talks about the size. “We’d need an extra room,” Kurt hums, voice quiet, calm. Sam hears something funny happening outside and he doesn’t care. “Somewhere for Rachel or Mike to stay when they visit.”  
  
In his head, Sam starts construction on his home and adds it on. It fits like it’s always been there.  
  
The photos on the wall are the ones from the bottom of Sam’s plastic bag, the creases all smoothed out and the edges cleaned by fancy frames Kurt picks. The photos Kurt has at the ones from his locker - the only ones Sam knows he has - of his dad, of Rachel, of Patti LuPone and a boy Sam’s picked out of his memory entirely. The walls behind the frames are smooth and white. He and Kurt painted them when they move in, and Sam knows all the uneven spots where the old creme colour fades in are the ones he made, distracted by Kurt in his oversized, messy painting clothes.  
  
Kurt picks out the curtains, the bedspread, the couches. Sam makes the changes. If he closes his eyes, he could be there. He could be home. He keeps them shut and kisses Kurt’s forehead, holds him close to his side.   
  
“It sounds nice,” Kurt says, almost dreamily, like he’s falling asleep. He and Sam’s hands are clutched over his heart, and he feels Kurt’s breath, warm and reassuring against his skin when he murmurs, softly, “It sounds -”


End file.
